It all began with a situation that we've all experienced before. United overbooked a flight from Chicago-O'Hare Airport to Louisville International, so they offered a voucher and a hotel in exchange for passengers to voluntarily give up their seats.

Then, things started to get weird. United let passengers board the plane, but then once everyone was seated, they said that four people had to give up their seats to make way for United crew members who needed to be on the flight. They bumped up the voucher amount, and when no one took it, they said they would draw people at random.

"After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate ... We apologize for the overbook situation," United said in a statement.

Twitter, as you might be able to guess, has not been kind to United, and the reactions range from snarky to straight up furious. On the snarky side, people are making some pretty pointed political comparisons and envisioning what it must be like to be United right now:

Some people are clearly making United's PR go insane by imagining the ways they could have handled this instead:

Surely, the airline would have been happy to spare a few hundred more dollars in exchange for this fallout.

Considering the number of people saying that they're going to fly with literally anyone else, this could turn out to be a costly mistake.

And some people — well, these people are the comedic geniuses you need to put all of the ridiculously bad news stories in the perfect context.

However you want to look at it, United Airlines is in hot water, and it was totally avoidable. Next time, maybe, don't let the passengers board first? Or offer more money. Or for goodness sake, send your crew there overland — the trip from Chicago to Louisville is only about five hours.

United is not making it better with their statement, which merely apologizes for overbooking the flight. Whatever the airline decide to do in the future, though, this episode is not going to help them gain any new passengers to fill those future flights.